1. Paint nails a suitable shade of teal. You want good coverage so you may need more than one coat. Allow to dry.

2. Using a makeup sponge, lightly sponge on other shades similar to your base color to add some variation. Turquoise is rather irregular so flat color won't look as realistic. I used a baby blue and a light mint green for this step. Again, allow to dry.

3. Apply a clear coat. While it is still wet sprinkle gold powered pigment onto your nails. You can also use loose eyeshadow for this. Allow to dry before rinsing your nails under cool running water to remove the excess pigment. Let your hands dry.

4. Tape off the skin around your nails, we're going to be water marbling! Seriously. Do this. You'll save yourself a lot of time with the cleanup.

5. Drop one drip of your black polish onto the surface of your water and allow it to spread a bit. Squirt the polish with about two pumps of hairspray at a distance of about two inches. It should break apart into little web like patterns and veins. This is what you want.

6. Dip your fingers into your now spotty, veiny floating polish. Gather up the excess with a cotton swab before removing your fingers from the water. Repeat steps 5 and 6 until all your fingers are done.

7. Clean up!

Trouble shooting:

1. If your polish isn't floating and spreading on the surface of the water there are a few possible reasons why. First of all, the polish might be old. Secondly, the water may not be room temperature. Third, and often overlooked, you may have hard water. If you suspect this to be the case, use distilled water.

2. The hairspray may mess with the surface tension of your water, making it difficult for your polish to spread properly. If this happens, dip a cotton swab into your water near to where the polish is floating. It should result in the polish spreading out a bit and allowing you to continue.

3. Don't sponge wet nails. You risk taking up some of your base color and you'll have a mess. If you want to do a second application with the sponge, allow the first to dry.

love this design! thank-you so much for explaining how you did this. I would love to try this one day....for water marbling, i never thought about using distilled water (maybe that has been my problem all along)

I can't remember where I first read about hard water causing issues with water marbling, but it's something I'm always happy to pass on because so many people don't know. When I was living in the Midwest I could never get water marbling to work. My polish just balled up on the surface and sank. It turned out it was because the water was hard and contained a lot of chemicals from treatment. Distilled water completely solved it, though!

And now that I'm living in rural New England I can just use tap water. Yey!